


postscript

by jontinf



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Declarations Of Love, F/M, Fluff and Crack, Humor, Non-Linear Narrative, One Shot, Parent Death, Post-Last Christmas, So Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 20:46:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4236048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jontinf/pseuds/jontinf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You should play hard to get.”</p><p>“That only confuses her.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	postscript

**Author's Note:**

  * For [withkissesfour](https://archiveofourown.org/users/withkissesfour/gifts).



There are a few crucial things the Doctor notices about the small human girl sitting at her lemonade stand on Beechcroft Lane. She wears eyeglasses with thick red frames that seem too large for head, and she enjoys squinting. Granted, that last trait is, perhaps, influenced by the midday sun shining directly on her face.

More notably, she seems entirely unworried by the fact that a few seconds earlier he'd flung a very irritated shark into a wormhole that he'd soniced out of thin air, all the while, yelling at the top of his lungs. She only gazes up, waiting for an explanation for his actions, as if this is yet another one of those daft things adults like to do, like running in place on machines and growing moustaches. This leads to a staring match, one appraising the other as the stranger party.

He's also noted that no one cared to run out of her house during all of the commotion. In the most serious look of disapproval that he can muster, he asks, “Where’s your human?”

“You mean my sister?” she says. “She’s out for lemons.”

“She should keep a better eye on you. You never know what cryptids or like-minded creatures can show up at any given moment.”

The girl casually squints in the direction of whatever shop her sister is patronising. “She’ll be back.”

“Right,” he says. Having filled a year's quota of showing interest in the plight of others, he stuffs his hands in his pockets, kicks the ground lightly, and steps in the direction of the TARDIS.

“Would you like a lemonade?” she calls after him.

“No,” he says without turning around. Then he remembers, leaps back to the stand, and rereads the cardboard sign that’s been taped onto the wooden crate that serves as her make-shift shop.

 _LEMONADE 20p_ | _❤ ADVICE FREE WITH PERCHES_

He uneasily scratches at an itch near the ridge of his brow, pacing a bit. Unless she’s a certified cardiologist, he assumes that the heart symbol means advice pertaining to matters of the heart in the spiritual sense.

And it’s not like he’s desperately _in_ _need_ of that kind of advice. Although he suspects that he knows someone who might feel differently.

The thing is that he’s been travelling with her again since Christmas, and the first thing they did was go on holiday in Brighton. The planet of Brighton. And that’s when—well, it’s a long story.

 

 

 

TWO WEEKS EARLIER

Everything is going blissfully well. Fish and chips at The Regency, pints at the pier, 3D interactive film screenings on the beach, a tour of the planet by an irreverent sea horse named Frank. They catch up with each other, talk about nothing and everything. It’s as if they haven’t seen each other in decades, not months; and considering that last dream, who can blame them?

Then they stumble upon a truth field and a chatty couple who have the audacity to ask them if they know of any good restaurants in the area. One thing leads to another, and he finds himself enthusiastically announcing: “I keep letting her runaway with me, because I fancy—”

Before he can say anything more, he slugs himself in the face. Everyone gasps in horror.

Later in their hotel room, Clara applies a pack of ice to his cheek. They haven’t exactly exchanged many words since the incident. There’s a part of him that hopes that if they don’t speak for a little longer, she’ll forget it ever happened; or at least, they could  _pretend_  that it never happened.Surely, she'll offer him that mercy.

“You’d rather literally punch yourself in the face than admit that you—” she makes a face and gestures aimlessly, “—you know.”

_Right._

He can see now that was _obviously_ an overreaction on his part, but he still makes the executive decision to diffuse the tension by antagonising her further, idiot with a box that he is.

“You can’t even say it yourself,” he says.

“Well, it’s a little bit like swearing in church, isn’t it?”

“That’s all they do in some churches!”

He’s not even sure what his point is anymore, aside from the need to be relentlessly argumentative, a predilection she shares with him. They can do this for days.

She swats him lightly on the elbow. “Don’t make me laugh! I’m mad at you.”

“My trick elbow!” He clutches at the not actually tricky body part. “Bully.”

She takes the ice pack from his face, exasperatedly smiles, and places her head on his shoulder. She has the look of someone who’s remembered that they live in _the real world_ and that there are certain things that are far too fantastic for which to hope.

“Take me home.”

He stares at her, not having expected this. “Are we alright?”

She pats the back of his hand and does her best to smile in reassurance. “Of course, we are,” she says. “Just tired is all.”

 

 

 

PRESENT DAY

The Doctor fidgets with the screwdriver in his jacket pocket and looks hesitantly at the little girl behind the lemonade stand. “Listen, ehm—”

“Penny,” she cheerfully prompts, pushing the bridge of her eyeglasses up her nose. It dawns on him that the glasses are much too large. Probably belonged to an adult. If her sister is her only guardian, those adults might no longer be in her life.

It’s utterly bananas that he’s thinking of doing this. But second chances don’t come along often, and he’d be a fool to fall into old habits. Besides, he has a soft spot for stout-hearted orphans. He once crashed into the garden of one in Leadworth a long time ago.

It’s not like anyone would know.

“Penny,” he says, “if I… _hypothetically_ had a friend who wanted to, I mean, he needed some advice about a woman, and so, how would he go about it… with that, with her?”

By some miracle, Penny understands that garble of language, is delighted, in fact, and clasps her hands on top of her crate, being called upon to practice her true calling in life. “You should play hard to get.”

“That only confuses her.”

“What if you were more direct?”

“ _My friend,_ you mean.”

She shakes her head. “No offence, but you don’t seem like someone who’d ask about chat up lines for a friend.”

“But I seem like the type to ask for _myself_?”

She only shrugs. “This person you fancy, is her hair nice?”

“It’s not as overbearing as the rest of her, but I wouldn’t put it down as my emergency contact or anything.” It takes a second before it occurs to him. “Oh, you mean—well, she cut it recently.”

They haven’t seen each other much since Brighton, but he did drop by for lunch. She stepped out of her classroom with her hair having shrunken to half its size and a new jacket. Black leather. An intriguing development.

“Does she look pretty?”

“That’s a very personal question.”

“Describe her.”

He sighs and puts his hand to the top of his chest. “She’s about this high,” he says, then moves his hand under his chin, “This high when she wants to reach a shelf. Brown hair. Eyes the size of persimmons. Ear lobes. Chin. Most of her internal organs.”

“You sound like a murderer.”

“I do, don’t I?”

He does like her smile. She has dimples that are hard to frown at. He does his best though.

“You should just be honest,” she says.

He _was_ being honest. Who out there will argue that Clara Oswald doesn’t have a chin? He echoes Penny’s advice with deep scepticism. “Honest.”

“Just say how you feel.”

“All of it?”

“The really important bits.”

He crouches forward and crosses his arms. “How did you become such an expert?”

A few days later he’ll realize that half of her suggestions probably came from what she overheard from her sister on the phone, and, well, the other half—

“I look at my sister’s magazines.”

“There’s magazines for these sorts of things?”

“There’s magazines for everything.”

“Interesting,” he says. “I owe you twenty pence?”

“Advice is free with a purchase.”

“Good bargain.” 

“I thought so.” She grins proudly.

He hands her a coin, the only change he has, and takes a paper cup in exchange, which he eyes suspiciously.

“So you live in that phone box then?”

“Yes.”

“She still your friend even though you live in a box?”

“…yes.”

Penny nods her head in approval. “That’s a really good sign.”

He smiles. The situation is a wee bit more complex than that, but who is he to stifle well wishes? “I hope you’re right.”

“You should get her a gift.”

“Oh,” he says. “I wouldn’t know—”

“What does she like to do in her spare time?”

After agreeing on a relevant gift, the Doctor bids Penny goodbye just as her sister arrives with a paper bag full of lemons. Later that day, Penny shows her sister the Doctor’s coin, and her sister tells her that it’s not worth twenty pence—it’s not even British. Days later, after a spontaneous but fateful google search, she discovers that the coin that Penny was given is a 1913 Liberty Head nickel, something the Doctor had picked up on his last visit to Kansas in the early twentieth century, a rare coin worth over two million pounds.

 

 

 

He bursts into Clara’s classroom, and each of her students snap their heads back in unison to find him out of breath, clutching the door frame, and looking manically at their teacher.

“As it turns out, I adore you."

The room is saturated in awkward silence as their audience immediately turns to Clara for her reaction. Her eyes go wide, which he was expecting. But then a certain sharpness comes into her gaze, nostrils flaring, making her look a bit furious, like a bull, and there he stands in her path like a matador with a death wish.

In his defence, he overshot the timing and thought she would be done with class by now. It is also in that moment that he sees the quote on the dry erase board that she’s chosen for that day’s lesson: 

> I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.  
>  —William Shakespeare, _Much Ado About Nothing_ , 1598.

Crikey. He gave up an afternoon of fun with fractals for this. (The correct date is also 1599, not 1598—not to nit-pick, well, _anyway.)_

Maybe she’s gone off men completely since he last saw her, and he’s just inappropriately blurted out his feelings to her, his best friend, and, on most days, his only friend, with a gesture he unwisely carried out in a room full of teenagers. She will now forever view him as a creepy old alien in a hoodie. Donna Noble’s _you’re not mating with me sunshine!_ vibrates keenly in his memory.

This is the last time he’ll ever take advice from a seven-year-old.

“Right, sorry,” he says. “I think I’ll just go and regenerate now—”

“I have a class to teach.” She keeps her composure a little too well. “Mr. Smith.”

“Of course,” he answers, chastened, and begins to turn away.

“Tell me again,” she says. He stops and turns around. “At the end of the day.”

Hope for him manifests on her face in the form of the faintest, smallest smile. _This_ look he knows very well. He’s completely misread. It’s not the look of murder, but of one where she’s made up her mind, when it’s very much in his favour. The looks are very similar, so it’s an easy mistake.

 _“Oooooohhhh,”_ the class coos together.

“Settle down,” their teacher scolds.

“See you later then,” he says. They stare fondly at each other, two ill-behaved children conspiring across a room, and with one last glance to punctuate the sea change, he closes the door behind him.

Clara lets out a breath, finally permitting a giddy grin to escape, replaying what has just happened in her mind and absorbing what it means. The class murmurs among themselves and someone wonders if all this was part of yet another surprise play.

The door is flung open again, and the Doctor holds a large barrel of apples, pink ladies to be exact, and puts it on the desk of the student sitting nearest to him. This is why his shoes are coated in mud. He’s been traipsing around fruit farms, picking tokens of affection for the teacher in his life, and with his luck, also fending off an invasion of body snatchers.

He pats the boy’s shoulder. “Would you pass this down to your teacher?”

“What, seriously?” the boy’s voice cracks.

“ _Yes!_ _Seriously!_ ”

The student stands in bewilderment, and the class silently watches him haul the apples to his teacher’s desk.

“For you, Miss,” the boy huffs sheepishly.

“Yes, thank you, Jim.” Clara places her hand on her forehead in disbelief.

The Doctor’s already gone by the time she looks up, having elected to avoid (or rather delay) being told off for using her students as manual labour.

 

 

 

She finds him sitting on one of the compartments in the lower level of the control room. He holds Jules Verne in one hand and a wrench in the other, having decided he’d multi-task tinkering with the matrix while rereading _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_. His attention is however devoted to neither, the words on the page clouding as he wonders if he’s made a terrible mistake, as he’s often wont to do.

He hears her knock on the railing and looks up to see her standing on the stairs. He parked the TARDIS in the caretaker’s shed so she could find him after work but now worries that this may have come off as too clingy.

“Thought I’d find you in your snogbox.” She watches him with a great deal of affection.

“She is not a snogbox, Clara.” He sets the book and wrench down, rises in one stern movement, and moves toward her, climbing each step until his face is level with hers and he’s bracing his hands on each of the railings. “She is the pinnacle of Gallifreyan ingenuity and imagination, a mastery of the laws of mass and energy and temporal and spatial mechanics, an expert julienner of chips—”

Before he can say one more word, she swings both her arms around his neck and pulls him into a kiss. They almost topple over, his eyelids frantic, then closing shut tightly, his limbs feeling longer than usual and her hugging him dizzyingly close, as though determined to cut off both their blood circulation and trigger a very romantic experience of shared cardiac arrest.

It takes a moment for him to realize that both his hands have found a place securely on her back, despite his not being cognizant of having put them there. They have acquired sentience apart from the rest of him and are somehow hoisting her even closer, ruffling and untucking the back of her shirt, signalling the collapse of the last bit of self-imposed intellectual resistance within him.

His nose presses into her cheek as she loosens her hold on him and her hands slip to his chest. There is an aftershock of gentler kisses, his world now encompassing only her, the storm of sensations stirred by each touch she exacts on him, the curtain of her hair, the taste and shape and softness of her mouth, the ragged heave of her breath.

Unwilling to concede defeat, he concludes in a deep daze, his eyes still closed, “—definitely not a snogbox.”

Her words are shaded with amusement when she whispers, “Are you going to take me somewhere?”

He probably was, but he really doesn’t remember anymore. His brain is currently recalibrating to the new world order, and her face is very close to his.

“Where would you like to go?” he finally asks.

“Last Tuesday,” she says. He opens his eyes, and his mouth goes slightly agape as if she's told a joke he didn’t understand.

“The weather was nice,” she explains, “nothing too sad in the newspapers, and I made a great toffee pudding.”

She shyly turns her attention to her hands smoothing the lapels of his jacket before saying what she wants to say next. Ever since Christmas, they find themselves taking turns being shy and ecstatic and exasperated and back to shy for good measure. The chemical composition of the air in a room shifting constantly when they’re in it. “I suppose it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever reliving that with you.”

He’s touched. It’s not something he’ll readily admit, what with a certain reputation to maintain, but he looks forward to this sort of thing, having a place saved for him at dinner, the novelty of tagging along to find first editions at a book market, being invited to a film on the release date, even when he knows how it’ll end (and that it’s terrible). He’s found that terrible films are actually wonderful when watched with people you like.

“We’ll cross into your timeline,” he says.

“Oh, I think we’ll manage to stay at a safe distance, find other ways to amuse ourselves.”

He feels her gaze on him as she follows him up the stairs to the console, all the while assuming that she means the farmers market in Torrington Square. But that only happens on Thursdays, and he catches the look in her eyes, which narrow on him unwaveringly, her pursed smile conveying that she expects him to know exactly what she is talking about (“ _you idiot_ ”) as it is directly related to what happened a moment ago.

The penny drops, and he’s automatically overcome with the impulse to sit in a closet somewhere and blush furiously for a solid twenty three minutes.

He clears his throat, drums his fingers on the console, grins wide, and then drops his mouth to a frown when he feels himself a bit foolish for it.

“There is such a thing as too keen,” he says as he punches in the coordinates for last Tuesday.

She stands at his side, leans on the console, and nudges his arm with hers. “I have a bushel of apples that might suggest otherwise.”

He will never live that down, and he doesn't care. He’s back to not frowning and refuses to look at her with his face so pathetically happy—ironic, because he’s also terrified. Honestly, he could punch himself. But that’s how the whole mess started in the first place.

“Get it together,” he thinks to himself. “You’re older than England.”

But he can tell that she’s smiling, beaming—maybe even blushing? No. Well, he’d have to properly look at her to make sure, which is _risky_.

“Fair point,” he says, concentrating very hard so that he doesn’t take them to a Tuesday in the Iron Age. It is essentially an empirical fact that nobody ever snogged anyone during the Iron Age, not even on special occasions, not in front of him anyway.

She presses her mouth to his shoulder and poises her hand on the lever that’ll lurch them out of the present. He finds her other hand and lets his own linger alongside it for a moment before lacing his fingers within hers and giving them a gentle squeeze.

This is it. Really. No more missed days. 

There was a time he bore his devotion in his nerves and sinews, the very thought of her causing an unyielding pang behind his ribs that he couldn’t understand. He dared not call it love but continued guessing at the civilizations that would most impress her, anchoring his box to East London, her life’s coordinates humming within his fingers.

They pull the levers together, doing their utmost to relish in the resulting surge of adrenaline, and he plucks up the courage to look at her, watches her laugh, and he knows, as he’s always known.

He trusts her with the entire universe.

**Author's Note:**

> Gifted to my true love Lo for her belated birthday. If it weren't for her birth, I would continue to hoard unfinished 12 fic on my computer past Capaldi's regeneration. Special thanks to Piper for looking over parts and listening to my litany of complaints about everything, most especially writing this story.
> 
> Nod to my friend A for "Where's your human?" That is how she talks in life.


End file.
